


honey in the lion's head

by Anonymous



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, slice of how is this my life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 03:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17500592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Eve catches up to Villanelle.  (Post 108.)





	honey in the lion's head

She spit some blood out onto the sidewalk. Eve cringed at the sound of it, at the halting pace of Oksana's walk, at her hunched form, and at her own role in making her this way.

"Oksana," she called.

Oksana hobbled away slightly faster. She did not turn around.

"Fine," she said, thinking of what Anna had said. Oksana didn't like to speak in Russian. She spoke English, she spoke French. She'd even chosen a new name for herself. Eve could play at that game. "Villanelle!"

Oksana--Villanelle--looked over her shoulder at Eve. "What do you want?" she asked. "To finish the job? I warn you, I am not such--"

"I want to help you."

Oksana turned around and pulled her jacket open. The wound was dark and angry, still dribbling blood. "You want to help? Like this?"

"I want to get you help," said Eve. "For that. Medical help."

Oksana glared at her, pulled the jacket shut, and spun around to keep walking. It would have been more impressive if she hadn't nearly fallen over.

Eve hurried to catch up with her. It wasn't hard. She put a hand under Oksana's elbow to provide her with support. Oksana looked at the hand like she might cut it off if Eve kept it there, but then she just kept trudging forward, ignoring Eve as much as she could. It was spectacularly childish. "Come on," she said. "Let's get you to a doctor."

Oksana spit again, this time with feeling. "I am not going to a doctor."

"What, do you think it's going to go away if you ignore it? Or are you planning on cleaning and sewing it up yourself?" Eve didn't think she had anyone she trusted to do it for her. She didn't like to think about someone else touching Oksana so intimately, so close to the heart. "You need a doctor."

"I do not."

"Go to a doctor, or--" Eve tried to remember what her friends and colleagues with small children (and she tried not to think of Bill, not when she was helping Bill's killer down the cobbled streets of Paris) did when they were recalcitrant and failed utterly. She couldn't ground Oksana, because grounding her meant she couldn't go to a hospital, and that meant she'd probably die, so grounding was counterproductive and out. Ditto more stabbing. "--or I'll cut off my hair."

"You will not!" The effect was electric: Oksana straightened up and stared in horror at Eve. One of her blood-covered hands made spastic, clenching movements, like she could grab Eve's hair away for safe-keeping, bundle it under the jacket with her blood and her wounds.

"I will." Eve took advantage of Oksana's response to get an arm fully around her and propel her towards what she remembered as being a busy street. "I'll walk straight into the nearest hairdresser and say, 'excusez-moi, pouvez-vous me couper les chevaux?'"

"Cheval is horse," said Oksana. "They will be like, no, of course not, what sort of sick fuck comes in here, wanting us to cut the horses?"

"They'll know what I meant." Eve had studied French in high school and had qualified as fluent by the American government's standards. Maybe in Americans' opinions, the French _did_ cut the horses. She didn't know.

"Maybe," said Oksana. She shrugged, and then hissed as the movement tore at her wound. Eve fought the bizarre impulse to just pick her up and carry her to the hospital herself. For one thing, she didn't know where the hospital was, and she didn't trust Oksana to tell her. For another, she couldn't carry Oksana that far, especially if Oksana didn't want to be carried. It would be like getting a hundred-plus pound cat to the vet. She was pretty sure Oksana bit. She was definitely sure that the thought of Oksana being a biter shouldn't turn her on.

She turned to the street. "Taxi," she said. "Taxi!"

One came to a halt, eventually. The driver was at least twice Eve's age, and the car smelled like grease and rosemary, someone's lunch, and a steady diet of cigarettes.

"We need to get to a hospital," she said. The driver just looked at her. Eve tried to root through her memories of French classes in school, but she couldn't think; her hand was pressing against Oksana's stomach, the blood warm against her fingers. "Come on. Doctors? A clinic? Emergency?" It should have been obvious where they needed to go, with the state Oksana was in.

"L'hopital," Oksana said.

The cab driver grunted and merged into traffic.

_Fuck France,_ thought Eve. _Seriously, fuck France._

The hospital, at least, was clean and courteous and no one was smoking where they shouldn't be. (Although on the way in, Eve heard a nurse scolding a patient, something about interdit and fumer, too fast for Eve to pick up anything but the general sense of the rebuke.) Triage took one look at Oksana's wound and moved them into a separate room.

"It's not that serious," Oksana stage-whispered. "They just don't want to alarm everybody else."

"Not that serious?" said Eve. "I stuck a knife in you. You've got blood everywhere."

Oksana waved the hand that wasn't clutching her stomach and leaned back against the wall, legs splayed, eyes half-closed, blood down her front. She looked like your garden variety misogynistic magazine shoot. "This is a flesh wound," she said. 

"So help me God--"

And that was when the nurse came in. She said something to Oksana in French, and Oksana answered, and then seemed to repeat herself in English for Eve's benefit. "My friend doesn't understand French, can we speak English?"

"Fine," said the nurse. She looked at Eve. "You can wait in the waiting room."

"She stays," said Oksana. "I need her."

Eve blinked. "It's okay, I can--"

"She provides moral support."

The nurse clearly didn't think this was necessary. "Fine," she said. "Take it up with the doctor, I don't care."

Oksana winked at Eve, and gave her a thumb's up. Eve felt like _she_ needed moral support, but here and now she had no idea where she was going to get it. The nurse was helping Oksana out of her jacket and cutting away her shirt. The bloody patch remained on her skin while the rest fell away, a little flower of fabric near her bra.

The nurse readied gauze, anti-septics, and a number of tools. Eve was reminded unpleasantly of the clinic in Berlin, the tables and chairs and the instruments that she wouldn't have wanted anywhere near her body. Oksana must have been remembering too, because she was smiling, and then the doctor came in.

She looked at Oksana, and then at Eve, and then, frowning at the nurse, said something in rapid-fire French.

"C'est ma femme," said Oksana, and Eve rubbed her forehead. She had not signed up for this.

The nurse clearly looked like this was the first time she was hearing this, and the doctor said something else to Oksana in French, something that probably went like, _I don't see you wearing a ring,_ or _if we asked for your papers, you wouldn't be able to prove it_ , or both, and Oksana said, quite simply, "She stays, or I cut you both open and pull out your organs and make you tell me the names of everything until you die."

"I'm sorry," said Eve. Damage control. "She gets like this sometimes."

She meant it, and her obvious exasperation and what the doctor probably thought was an empty threat seemed to convince her. "Fine," she said, "but stay out of the way, unless I ask for you."

The nurse was now swabbing at the wound, and Oksana was staring at the doctor with, if not quite murder in her eyes, then a small piece of grievous bodily harm.

"May I ask," said the doctor, "how this occurred, and if I will be coordinating with the police on this?"

Oksana rolled her eyes. "The police?"

"It looks like you were assaulted with a weapon."

Oksana laughed. The nurse, who was trying to clean out the wound, swore at the movement, and the doctor said something sharply in French that was probably _stop it_ or _stay still_ or _there's nothing funny about being stabbed in the chest_. Eve would like to remind Oksana of that last herself, but she was the one who stabbed her, so she kept quiet and hoped it really was just a flesh wound.

"It was a stupid accident," said Oksana, meeting Eve's eyes. She looked like she was having fun. Eve could feel a headache creeping on. "We were celebrating and we were drunk." They did both smell of champagne, Eve realized. They _stank_ of it. And that was probably a good thing, because being drunk would excuse a lot of Oksana's behavior right now. "My friend went to cut another slice of cake, I went to grab some frosting to eat, she turned at the wrong time, and bam!"

"Wife," said Eve. It was important to maintain their cover story.

The doctor raised an eyebrow, but honestly Eve would prefer she think they were lying about their relationship than about how Oksana had ended up in emergency.

Was this something that happened to French people a lot? Eve tried not to be judgmental but she was fairly sure that it happened in Russia all the time. Even in England you could probably get away with a bit of accidental violence if you'd been drunkenly watching football at the time. Or just drunkenly out with friends. _I dropped my pint glass and as I was picking up the shards, my friend ran into one,_ Eve tried to imagine saying to a NHS doctor who, in her mind, looked disappointed in everything the United Kingdom chose to be.

"It looks like none of your organs were harmed," said the doctor, "so we're giving you stitches. They're the type that dissolve, but still, don't get drunk and try to pick them out."

"Ha," said Oksana. "Ha. Good one, Doctor Margaux."

"That's not my name," said the doctor, making another notation on the chart before sweeping out. They'd been relegated to drunken adulterers with a minor injury, and Eve was breathed a sigh of relief. No police report, no moralizing, no recommendations for substance abuse or other counseling, just a routine procedure and discharge. Another day ending in -y. Or, since this was France, -i.

"Here," said Oksana, and pulled out a fistful of euro notes. She put it in the nurse’s hand. "Buy me something nice in pink, okay? And maybe the same thing in green. You can keep the change." She winked at the nurse.

The nurse left. Eve wasn't sure if she was motivated by the money or just taking the excuse to get out of the room while she still could.

"Well," said Eve, sitting down next to Oksana. The stitches were a neat, professional job; Oksana was pulling back the gauze pad to check, so Eve got an eyeful. "That could have gone worse."

"Told you," said Oksana. "Flesh wound."

"You threatened to kill the doctor." With the panic gone, the fatigue returned; even Eve's _bones_ ached with how tired she was.

"Torture," corrected Oksana, and snuggled her head onto Eve's shoulder. Eve hated how nice it felt there, but it was the only thing in her life right now that didn't feel out of place.

Oksana started playing with her hair. "You wouldn't really cut it off," she said. "That was an idle threat, no?"

"Don't try me," said Eve, leaning her head against the wall and closing her eyes. Maybe Oksana would try to run again, but she didn't move.

"You know, I think I like you," Oksana whispered.

Eve cracked open her eyes, and looked down at her. "Even though I stabbed you?"

"Maybe a little more because," said Oksana.

"Oh, god." Eve shut her eyes again, and waited for the nurse to return.


End file.
